By Neil Ayres

“It was the discovery that someone else had got to him before I had that initially dampened my interest. Prior to that revelation I was confident in my ability to coerce. I would shine. But afterwards all I could ever muster was a muted glow. As the reflection at night in the eye of a startled woodland denizen is to the virile darting of a posturing firefly, I was as an ember to my competitor’s raging inferno.

“Now I am dead. Not interred within the earth as so much food for grubs and worms but scattered on the autumn wind, a man in a million pieces; a creature of dusts. Thus I am now, in this limited omnipresence. Even dying, I did not flare and spark as he had done. I smouldered and I boiled in the juices that had been my life, until all that was left were the cindered remnants of what had once been such yielding and malleable flesh. No moisture remained; all had bubbled away into atmosphere.

“And so my ever-loving and loyal daughter freed my mortal remains, flicking me out into the ebon and star-less night. A silver urn: filled with ashen flesh, bones, sinew and the burned suit they had paraded me in during the aimless ceremony that had been my funeral, an event that had completely missed the point, by the widest imaginable margin.

“He once said to me that the only existence after death is in the memories of those whose lives you have touched with your own. I never imagined that it was the intent of such a profound statement to be taken quite so literally.

“Yet here I am. Physically, no more than pretty particles glittering in the shadows that are at a certain time of day skewered by curious and probing sunbeams, dancing with dust-motes. And then there is that other part of me. The part that reaches out to you now, even as you strive to imagine this being, so alien and yet somehow, so familiar, groping out from the ether to touch, ever so lightly to touch, your graciously receptive mind. This is the part of me that revels in your dreams and delights at the basic pleasures of the imagination and the escapism in which you indulge.

“In time I will grow, increasing my strength and my abilities. Like him I will come to you in visions and ideas so startling in their simplicity that they will cause you to gasp and fight for breath and perhaps as my strength grows, perhaps his fire will diminish in power, the promise of it becoming a comforting heat rather than such a burning passion.

“For now I bide my time and wait with a patience borne of immortality. Drifting in the heady allure of a shallow sleep.”

THE END